Hildegarde Oskison: 

Writing Was in Her Blood

In 1950, when Hildegarde Oskison had turned 79 years old and had written nearly two dozen books, she announced that she would retire from writing and commence to enjoy what others   had written. She did not, however, retire from community involvement and continued to attend Ridgefield Town Meetings and First Congregational Church activities and could be seen each day walking to the post office from her home on East Ridge and later, The Elms Inn. 

During her long career, Oskison had probably out-produced her more illustrious grandfather, publishing 23 books and many newspaper and magazine pieces, usually under her maiden name, Hildegarde Hawthorne.

One of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s seven grandchildren, Hildegarde Hawthorne was born in New York City in 1871 but spent much of her youth growing up in England, Germany, Jamaica, and Long Island — her father, Julian Hawthorne, was a journalist, novelist and poet who moved around a lot. 

She had little formal education, outside of tutors and her parents, but clearly had inherited her family’s love of writing. When she was only 16, her first short story was published in St. Nicholas, a magazine for children, and she continued to write for young people throughout her life.

When she was 20, Harper’s published the first of her articles aimed at adults and she went on to produce hundreds of pieces on travel, gardening, and other subjects, as well as to write many ghost stories. Among her 23 books were half dozen biographies, including one on her grandfather, called

“The Romantic Rebel,”  and others on  Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau. She also wrote six Westerns aimed at young readers, several histories, a book on gardening, and many travelogues.

“The travelogues, such as Corsica (1926), are highly descriptive, personal accounts,” said biographer Jane Stanbrough. “Of her histories, ‘California’s Missions’ (1942) is a very interesting and directly related account of those missions and the men who founded them. It is a well-written work that still deserves to be read.”

As for those Westerns, Stanbrough characterized them as “superficial and hackneyed.”

In 1920, she married John Milton Oskison (1874–1947), a writer and journalist who was the first person of American Indian descent to graduate from Stanford University.  They lived for many years in California where Hildegarde became a frequent hiker and camper, and often established friendships with both backwoodsmen and American Indians. She produced three books on California and used her wilderness experiences in writing her Westerns.

During World War I, Oskison assisted the soldiers by serving with the YWCA troop support services in France and with the Red Cross. At the same time, she provided dispatches to The New York Times and The New York Herald about aspects of the war she was witnessing. In the 1920s she also wrote many book reviews for both papers.

In the early 20th Century, Oskison was active in the woman’s suffrage movement and took

part in many rallies.

She came to Ridgefield around 1940, living on East Ridge; by then, she had been separated from her husband. By the late 1940s, she had moved to The Elms Inn on Main Street. She died in 1952 at the age of 81.

Her last article, written for Reader’s Digest when she was nearly 80 years old, described her aunt, Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, a writer who after a troublesome marriage to an alcoholic who died of cirrhosis,  became a Catholic nun. In 1901, as Mother Mary Alphonsa, O.P., Rose Hawthorne established  the Rosary Hill Home for terminally cancer patients, which still operated today in Hawthorne, N.Y., by an order of nuns that she founded.

Samuel G. Goodrich: 

The Extraordinary Peter Parley

Samuel G. Goodrich was an extraordinary fellow on several fronts. The man who was known to millions in the 19th century as “Peter Parley” provided the nation with a new kind of textbook for its schools, helped introduce the world to one of America’s greatest early authors, and gave Ridgefield a remarkable account of life in the town more than 200 years ago.

Samuel Griswold Goodrich was born in 1793 in a house, no longer standing, near the corner of West and Golf Lanes. His father, the Rev. S. G. Goodrich, had moved there in 1789 to become the third minister of the First Congregational Church. 

When young Samuel was four, his father had a new home built on four acres on High Ridge; the house still stands today at the head of Parley Lane. Samuel spent his childhood there, and left in 1808 to work in a Danbury store and then in Hartford, eventually winding up in the publishing business in Boston. 

Literally millions of his Peter Parley books—chiefly histories, biographies and geographies—were sold in the 1800s. Some scholars consider Goodrich to be the father of the modern textbook because he made his schoolbooks interesting to children, both in the way they were written and in the way they were illustrated.

His brother, Charles A. Goodrich, was also an author whose histories were widely used in 19th century schools. 

Charles was a Yale graduate; Samuel never went to college, and when asked where he was schooled,  “My reply has always been, ‘at West Lane,’” he wrote, referring to the one-room Ridgefield schoolhouse he had attended as a boy. “Generally speaking, this has ended the inquiry, whether because my interlocutors have confounded this venerable institution with ‘Lane Seminary,’ or have not thought it worthwhile to risk an exposure of their ignorance as to the college in which I was educated, I am unable to say.”

Those words appeared in his 1,100-page “Recollections of A Lifetime,” published four years before his death in 1860. This autobiography offers more than 200 pages on what it was like growing up in Ridgefield at the turn of the 19th century and is a unique look at the life and characters in the town then. Few communities in this country are fortunate enough to have as extensive, as literate and as intimate a report on daily life two centuries ago.

Goodrich lived many of his adult years in the Jamaica Plain section of Roxbury, now part of the city of Boston, buying 45 acres of “wilderness” there in 1837. Interested not only in literature and publishing, he was also involved in political life, and served as both a state representative and a state senator from Roxbury in the Massachusetts legislature. (Today, there is a Peter Parley Road in the Jamaica Plain district of Boston, recalling Goodrich’s estate there.)

Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Allan Nevins called Goodrich “Ridgefield’s greatest literary son.” Nevins said Goodrich’s “greatest service to pure literature” was not his books, but his illustrated annual, “The Token,” which he edited from 1828 until 1842. “The Token” published the works of rising authors, including Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edward Everett, John Adams, and Horace Greeley as well as Goodrich himself. 

Hawthorne called “The Token” “a sort of hothouse, where native flowers were made to bloom like exotics.” 

During this period, these annuals became so popular, they were widely pirated, and Goodrich became what Nevins called “a figure of importance in the literary world.” Hawthorne, no doubt with tongue in cheek, called Goodrich “a gentleman of many excellent qualities, although a publisher.”

Nevins maintained that “Hawthorne … owed Goodrich a heavy debt, which he frankly acknowledged, for encouragement while he was still totally unknown. Goodrich saw the romancer’s first sketches when they were published anonymously, and inquired concerning their authorship, thus bringing about a correspondence.”

In those letters, Goodrich found Hawthorne depressed because his early works were not being published or appreciated. “I combated his despondency, and assured him of triumph, if he would persevere in a literary career,” Goodrich wrote in “Recollections.”

Goodrich not only published, but also promoted Hawthorne, writing essays for newspapers that praised his writing and networking on Hawthorne’s behalf in the publishing world. “In 1837, he urged Hawthorne to publish a volume, and helped him find a firm to issue ‘Twice-Told Tales,’ ” Nevins said.

“Twice-Told Tales” wound up getting fine reviews, including one from Edgar Allen Poe, who wrote: “The style of Hawthorne is purity itself. His tone is singularly effective—wild, plaintive, thoughtful, and in full accordance with his themes…We look upon him as one of the few men of indisputable genius to whom our country has as yet given birth.” The Grolier Club, the nation’s oldest society for book-lovers, named “Twice-Told Tales” the most influential book of 1837.

Hawthorne went on to become famous for such novels as “The Scarlet Letter” and “The House of the Seven Gables” while Goodrich, by his own accounting, published more than 170 books under the name of Peter Parley, many making use of other writers. His last effort, which appeared in 1859, was a 1,400-page, two-volume tome, “The Animal Kingdom Illustrated,” also later called Johnson’s Natural History.

Late in life, Goodrich was named U.S. consul in Paris and although millions copies of his books were already in print, he took that opportunity to get some of his titles published in French. He may have been a great literary man but he was also a savvy businessman.